Fountain Pens

I’ve been having trouble keeping this instance up - right now, it’s a problem with proxy errors between the docker containers as well as with the Ansible scripts. It’s taking too much time to maintain. I'll be shutting down wayfarershaven.eu per 31 October 2023.

That means that the fountainpens community here will also disappear. Anyone who would like to restart this on another instance is more than welcome to do so.

Hey all! My apologies for the fact that the instance has been down. For those who are curious, it turns out that the Lemmy volumes had ballooned and taken up all the space on the server. I've reclaimed the space and set a recurring task to make sure that it automatically gets cleaned up going forward.

This shows the vulnerability of small instances run by a single admin - I wasn't able to sit down and troubleshoot the issue. I don't have a good solution for you beyond recognizing that sometimes things willl take time when there isn't a team or paid business with SLAs. If you have things you'd like to see change, I'm happy to discuss.

Pilot Metropolitan Calligraphy Nib - Herbin Rouge Grenat

Got a fair price on ebay on a couple of Sailor 21s. Love them, but modern converters seem to fit only in theory.

Cutting them down works, but also makes it nearly impossible to advance or retract, because there's no leverage on the screw that moves the plunger.

Am I missing an obvious source here?

Edit: They can be made to unscrew if a syringe is used to push the plunger up consistently, there's just enough to grab onto. Still not ideal, but...

I know the A-series is more common, but I sometimes prefer the B-series. It's nice if, for example, you're looking for something between A4 and A5 (i.e. B5).

Individual images made by Wikipedia user Bromskloss (CC BY-SA 3.0)

I currently have a Life writing pad for letter writing. I like it, but I would like to try some other loose leaf paper. Does anyone have recommendations? I would prefer lined, but unlined is ok if the paper is thin enough to use a guide sheet underneath.

Currently, I use the old Tomoe, but someday that will run out, and it's hard to know what shows off ink the best.

Platinum 3776 and my cat Una.

Sharing because I can see this community having thoughts to share. :)

cross-posted from: https://wayfarershaven.eu/post/182136

With so much note taking apps nowadays, I can't understand why does anyone still write notes with pen and paper. You need to bring the notepad, book or that paper to retrieve that information, and most of the time you don't have it in hand. While my phone almost always reachable and you carry when you go out. For those still like to do handwriting, there's many app does that and they can even convert it to text notes.

So, if you still write notes with pen and paper, why?

Currently inked list just keeps getting longer...

Context: I take a ton of notes in meetings, journal, and make lists - for now, I have them all lined up on my left. I take one from the right, use it, and when I put it down it goes on the left.

Next time I need a pen, I grab the next one, and so on. Makes it much easier to discern where things start and end.

Alt text for image: Currently Inked:

• Perkeo / Pumpkin
• Plasir / Golden Ivy
• Metropolitan / Peridot
• Safari / Midway the Magnificent
• Sport / Comet SL9
• Kakuno / Earl Grey
• Safari / Pink Sugar Beach
• Safari / Julia
• Preppy / Quinuai
• Perkeo / Hana Ikada
• Prefounte / Apple Glory
• Preppy / Topical Glow
• Perkeo / Song Southern Country -Perkeo / Hotaru Bi
• Sailor / Peach Haze
• Perkeo / Sodalite
• Sport / O.F. Schwartz
• Safari / Tsutsuji.

Each written with the pen and ink combo in question.

Oh boy, where do I even start. Some time ago I decided to buy a second pen. I wanted something cheap to use with a document ink. Because my choises of ink were quite limited (and still are), I decided to pick Koh-I-Noor Document Blue as

• relatively cheap ink,
• relatively well-behaved ink (allegedly),
• bottle says it's blue.

As for the pen, I decided to buy Kaweco Perkeo with M nib size for no particular reason, besides nice nib quality (allegedly), and it being basically overgrown Kaweco Sport, which people say is a good pen.

And well, I kinda hate and love this duo at the same time.

First of all - colour. It's nice shade of blue, if you filling your converter as intende. Which means inserting it inside the pen and then dipping the nib in ink.

Otherwise the colour of ink will be a bit different. You can say it's blue, but not quite. It's too soft and pastel for it's own good. Especially when you consider that officials don't like different colours when you're signing documents.

To be fair it's indeed a document ink. It's fairly water-resistant. In my tests water didn't blur the ink very much, and in the rubbing test Koh-I-Noor surrendered, when the paper started to wear out, so in that regard the ink is adequate.

And speaking of it's water-resistance, as any other document ink, Koh-I-Noor Document Blue will clog your pen when you don't write with it frequently enough. Well, at least write once a week with it, or your pen will start skipping.

Speaking of the pen, you definitely need to wash it before use, or it will burp ink when converter is half-full. When I didn't wash the nib and feed properly, I was experiencing skipping, and colour was a bit dull.

Nib is good. Lines are thinner than Lamy Safari M nib, and it writes smooth.

So in conclusion, maybe I just need to use another ink in my Perkeo. But for now it works.

Today is Montblanc Heritage 1912 <B CI> with Aurora Black, taking notes at work. What about you?

Do we have a wiki? Didn't see one, in the sidebar. Would be willing to host and port content from r/fp. There was some very useful data/collected wisdom there.

Edit 23-08-10: It's live, and there's even some content there. Descend freely upon it, y'all know what to do. :) Working on rules, wiki, and the trappings of communities that aren't yet baked into the codebase.

https://wayfarershaven.eu/post/154395

https://wayfarershaven.eu/c/pen_swap

--

Nice to meet you all, I used to be active over on the other place...

One of the resources I liked having was Pen_Swap - is there any interest here in something like that?

Thank you to @Valdair@kbin.social for submitting the suggestions for a banner and to everyone who voted! The photo of the Nakaya Decapod (#3) won by a 60% landslide.

@fountainpens We need special Diamine inks.

We have four possibilities for a new community banner image thanks to @Valdair@kbin.social. Please vote by commenting on which image you would prefer. One comment will be one vote. Voting closes on Friday 4 August.

#1 - may need some cropping to find the right aspect ratio:

#2 - Montblanc Heritage 1912

#3 - Nakaya Decapod

#4 - Waterman, TWSBI, Nakaya, Pelikan, Lamy, Parker, Montblanc, Pelikan, Montblanc

These are photos from when I first took delivery of my Nakaya, an aka tamenuri (red urushi lacquer) Neo-Standard, from back in 2016. The nib was an SF with added flex cuts, and though it ran dry fairly quick, when it was primed it wrote in an almost brush-like manner. It was very unique, but difficult to use every day, which is part of why I got rid of it.

The big, beautiful nib of the Montblanc 149 is what first captured my interest in fountain pens. Many years later, and many pens tried, I have a handful I really just love writing with and I still think the nib designs are some of the most beautiful.

1950s Montblanc Slimline, XXF
Modern Montblanc 146, BB CI
1960s Montblanc 149, EF
Montblanc Heritage 1912, B CI

I've tried lots of pens over the years. The ones I can remember:

• Conid Bulkfiller Regular
• Cross Aventura
• Jinhao 159, X450, (also whatever the Safari clone is, 777 I think?)
• Lamy 2000, 2000 Amber, Safari
• Montblanc 145, 146, 149, 320, 1912, Slimline
• Nakaya Decapod, Neo-Standard
• Parker IM
• Pelikan M200, M600, M800
• Platinum 3776, Preppy
• TWSBI 580, Eco, Vac 700
• Visconti Homo Sapiens Bronze Age, Dark Age
• Waterman Phileas Blue

I'm not much of a collector, so I have cycled through and gotten rid of almost all of these. I only have around ~10 now, just the ones that I really like, or are sentimental, or are just super unique. One brand that's escaped me is Sailor. I've read about the 21K nibs and how people fawn over them. I know there are die-hard Sailor supporters and it seems to mostly revolve around this nib. But, $300+ for a proprietary cartridge/converter that isn't made from unique materials seems like a lot.

So, if I was going to "try" Sailor, as a manufacturer, where does it make sense to start to see if I get it or not? Do people prefer the Realo (piston filled) variants? From what I can tell here and on /r/fountainpens people are mostly content with the C/C versions. So is it just the unique colors? Or is it just the 21K nib and nothing else matters?

Hello, I'm hoping to find someone that has experience repairing a Sheaffer Snorkel.

I recently inherited a Snorkel from my grandfather who passed away in the '80s. I read up on them a bit, and saw that you could buy repair kits, and got everything I needed to proceed. Well...I didn't read the instructions thoroughly before attempting to take the pen apart, and broke the filler tube insert.

It had slipped out the end of the tube, and I thought it was dried ink, grabbed and pulled, and broke it while pulling it out.

I'm guessing that the purpose of this is to keep ink from dripping out the filler tube while writing, but I'm not sure.

Does anyone know if it's possible to use the pen without a filler tube insert? If not, is it possible to find replacements, or substitute another material to fix?

It'd been a minute since I bought a new pen, and I've always wanted to try a vacuum fill pen so I finally pulled the trigger. The pen writes so well straight out of the box but that's always been my experience with TWSBI pens. The kon-peki ink is a nice beautiful blue that also seems to dry fairly quickly which is nice because I'm a lefty and it's impossible for me to write without making a mess lol.

Left hand Lamy Safari Vista alongside a travelers company notebook in basic brown leather.

I was really excited to sneak away for an hour and pick this up on a recent work trip.